


Like Dust, I Rise

by dracusfyre



Series: Tony Stark Bingo Challenge [17]
Category: Marvel Cinematic Universe
Genre: Avengers: Infinity War Part 1 (Movie) Spoilers, F/M, POV Pepper Potts, Pepper Potts: Codename Rescue, grieving Pepper Potts
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-09-02
Updated: 2018-09-02
Packaged: 2019-07-05 15:53:31
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,648
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/15866841
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/dracusfyre/pseuds/dracusfyre
Summary: With Tony Stark missing, possibly dead, Pepper has little time to grieve before she realizes she has to try to fill the (gold-titanium) shoes he left behind.For the photo prompt in square S2: Tony holding a holographic version of the Captain America shield.





	Like Dust, I Rise

            Even as she watched Tony walked through that portal with Bruce, Pepper had the sinking feeling that she was never going to see him again.  It made her want to grab his arm or call him back, but she pressed her lips together tightly and kept silent, swallowing thickly around the lump in her throat as the glowing portal faded away.

            “Hey, what happened to Tony?” Happy said, pulling up in the golf cart. “Did he leave? He knows he’s not supposed to-”

            Pepper cleared her throat and quickly wiped away the moisture at the corner of her eyes.  “He got called away, Happy. By something important.”

            “Important?” Happy caught on when Pepper gave him a significant look. “Oh, you mean like… _important._ ”

            “Exactly.”  Happy was looking at her expectantly, and Pepper knew she needed to go home and get on with her day, but she found herself reluctant to leave this spot, as if Tony were going to return any moment and she wanted to be here when he did.

            “Is he, uh, coming right back?” Happy said after a while of them just standing there.  They were going to gather a crowd at this rate.

            “No. Um, you’re right, let’s…let’s go.”  She climbed into the golf cart and let Happy speed her back to the car, not letting herself look back as they drove away.

           

            She was in the shower when the other shoe fell.  “Ms. Potts?” Friday said politely. “I think there’s something you should see.” Her voice was a little muffled because the AI’s speaker was in the bedroom and the bathroom door was closed. Pepper finished quickly and pulled on a bathrobe.

            “What is it, Friday?”  Instead of answering, the wall in front of the TV flickered on, showing shaky cell phone footage of a strange circular space ship hovering over the city.  The news station switched to another video, also clearly taken from a phone, that showed four people standing in front of what was clearly, even at this distance, two aliens.  The person filming zoomed in, but Pepper didn’t need that to recognize the four figures, especially not the one who was front and center.

            “Dammit, Tony,” she whispered, and stumbled backward to sit on the bed. There was a couple more minutes and then the footage ended and the channel went back to the newscaster.

            “We’re getting reports of Iron Man fighting one of these aliens in Central Park, while Spiderman is pursuing the other through the city. We go now to-”

            “Oh, God. _Peter._ ”  Pepper pressed her fingers to her lips and inhaled shakily.  “Friday, is there anything else? Any other videos of Tony?”

            “I’ll look, ma’am.  Would you like to call him?”

            “Yes, please, right now.”  Pepper waited for a moment, chest so tight she couldn’t breathe, and then she heard the call connect. “Tony!” She got to her feet. “Oh, my God, are you alright? What’s going on?”

            “Yeah, I’m fine,” Tony assured her, but Pepper could hear the bad news in his voice and she dropped back onto the bed. “I think, uh, we might have to push our 8:30 rez.”

            “Why?” But she knew why.

            “Just cuz I’ll not…make it back for a while.”

            Pepper couldn’t breathe. “Tell me you’re not on that ship,” she pleaded. The footage on the television was showing the circular ship quickly leaving the city, heading back up into space.

            Pepper heard his deep inhale. “Yeah.”

            “Oh God, no. Please. _Please_ tell me you’re not on that ship,” she begged.

            “Honey, I’m sorry. I’m sorry, I don’t know what to say, I-"

            “Come back here, Tony! I swear to God, you come back here right now.” Whatever he said in response was garbled, and she knew she was losing him. “ _Come back!”_

            But the only sound was the call disconnecting. “I’m sorry, Ms. Potts. I’ve lost signal with his suit.”

            “No.” She whispered. “No. Try again,” she said a little louder.

            “I’m sorry, Ms. Potts,” Friday said after a moment.

            Pepper laid down slowly and curled into a ball, tears streaming down her face.  She had no idea how long she lay there; Friday spoke a couple of times to let her know that so-and-so was calling or somebody was requesting a statement, but after Pepper finally said, “Just handle it, Friday,” the AI fell silent.  She cried long enough that she gave herself a headache and fell asleep, then woke up, remembered, and cried some more.  She knew, intellectually, that she should probably eat something because she’d only had that bagel and a banana for breakfast, but the idea of eating made her nauseous.

            “Ma’am, Colonel Rhodes is here, requesting entrance.” At Pepper’s damp sigh, Friday said, “He did try to call first, but I told him you weren’t available and he said he was coming anyway.”

            “Fine,” she said dully.  “Tell him to give me a minute.” Pepper managed to drag herself to her feet, still wrapped in her robe. She shuffled to the bathroom and avoided her reflection as she splashed cold water on her face, washing away the salt tracks of tears and pressing her chilled fingers to her swollen eyes. She dried her face and pulled on the first thing that came to hand; it wasn’t until she was pulling the shirt over her head and smelled it that she realized she had grabbed one of Tony’s.

            She leaned against the wall and took a few sobbing breaths, palms digging into her eyes as she tried to hold back more tears.  God, she’d done so much crying she couldn’t believe she had any tears left.

            “Oh, no, Pepper,” Rhodey said as soon as he saw her, and Pepper realized that he had come here looking for news of Tony. “What-”

            “He’s gone,” she said before he could finish, giving him the news like ripping off a bandaid. “On the ship.” She gestured vaguely towards the ceiling. “Into space.”

            “Oh, Pepper,” he repeated, and she let him pull her into his arms, fisting her hands in his shirt and still trying to push away the tears.  But the feeling of his broad, warm palm on her back just reminded her of Tony so with a hitching breath and a moan the tears started again. “Come on,” he said gently, steering her towards the couch to sit. He kept an arm around her shoulders like he was afraid she was going to fall apart if he let her go.  “What can you tell me?”

            She managed to get out the story around the tears, knowing it sounded a bit garbled.  Some parts Rhodey probably knew better than she did, because she knew he was living at Avengers compound now and had probably known about the space ship before almost anyone else.  

            “Jesus, Tony,” was his only comment when she was finished.  Through her tears she could see that the news had hit him hard, too, because he look like he’d aged years in just the few minutes that he’d been there.  He took a deep breath and let it out slowly, scrubbing his hands over his face. “Ok,” he said, looking a little lost. “Ok. Um, I need to get back to the compound.  We need to write up some kind of statement for the press, and I’m going to have to make a lot of calls. I think you should come with me,” he said gently, putting his hand over hers.  “We don’t know what’s going to happen, and it will be the safest place for you.  And Tony will know where to find you _when_ he comes back,” he emphasized, which like seemed very kind and infuriatingly stupid thing to say.

            “Ok,” she said.  Now that the first wave of grief had ebbed, she just felt numb.  Rhodey’s logic was sound, and if she needed to, she could work as easily from the compound as she could anywhere else, Tony had made sure of it.  With Rhodey’s help she gathered up what she thought she might need, and despite herself she hiccupped a laugh when she saw the quinjet on the lawn. 

            “I came as fast as I could,” he explained, apologetic because the engines had scorched the grass and the landing gear had pressed deep grooves in the lawn.

 

            Being at the compound was almost worse than being at home, because this space was even more uniquely Tony; still messy from his last visit, with a pile of screws and nuts on a side table from where Tony put them in his pocket in the lab and carried them to his room, clothes draped over a chair, toothbrush and razor sitting next to the sink instead of in the cabinet.  Everything whispered that Tony had just stepped out and would be right back, so Pepper left rather than more hours crying into a pillow that smelled like Tony.  Eventually she found herself in Tony’s lab, surrounded by even more of his ghosts. She sat down at his work station and felt a sharp pain in her chest when she saw the various drafts of their wedding invites scattered across the desk.

            _I dreamed we had a kid,_ he’d said.  God, she wished she were pregnant. Then there would be some part of Tony left other than the mute memorial of his lab. 

            Coming here was a bad idea.  She needed some fresh air.  Thankfully, the new Avengers compound was located in the middle of miles of untouched wilderness, so a couple of laps around the perimeter in the failing light of the afternoon, waving self-consciously to the guards each time she passed them, eventually made her tired enough that she thought she might be able to sleep.

 

            She couldn’t sleep. 

            Or rather, she couldn’t sleep _anymore_ ; taking a sleeping pill at seven in the evening left her wide awake at four in the morning, body aching and head filled with wool. She wasn’t surprised when she got up and the found the coffee in the pot still warm; she doubted that Rhodey was getting much sleep right now.  She gave a brief thought to tracking him down and getting a situation update, but she still felt emotionally exhausted to talk to anyone; instead, some masochistic instinct led her back down to Tony’s lab.  DUM-E waved at her from his spot in the corner and she managed to muster a small smile for him as she wandered around the room, fingers trailing over tools and spare parts.  When she sat down at Tony’s work station again, her elbow hit the mouse and turned on the monitor.

            The main screen was his desktop, cluttered with projects and program icons, but the screen on the right was paused in the middle of a video. Pepper only hesitated for a moment before pressing play.  The video was from recording of a Stark Industries board meeting and Tony was brandishing what looked like a holographic model of Steve’s shield.  In the video she saw herself come through the door and he turned to her and said, “Pepper! Throw your shoes at me.”  Pepper remembered this – Tony had been playing around in the boardroom with his latest invention and Pepper had been impatient to get the meeting started.  She felt a stab of guilt, now, for being so short with him, and rewound it from the beginning to see Tony smiling again.

            “Ms. Potts, Colonel Rhodes is requesting authorization for Bruce Banner to use one of the Boss’s suits,” Friday said. "Since he’s not available, it’s your call."

            Pepper blinked, a little disoriented because the AI’s voice was coming through the computer monitor instead of through the ceiling speakers.  “For Bruce?” She echoed in confusion. She’d thought he’d been with Tony.  “Um, okay, sure.  Do whatever Tony would have wanted, I’m sure he had a - a protocol for it.”

            “Of course, ma’am.”

            Pepper hit play on the video again, this time focusing on the curve of his mouth, the way his eyes lit up when she came into the room, and felt her throat getting tight again.  “He had a protocol for everything, didn’t he?” she murmured as she rewound the video again.  

            She was talking to herself, but Friday’s audio feed picked up her question. “The Boss has approximately 57 protocols in place, Ms. Potts, based on what the disaster scenarios he predicted to be the most likely to occur.”

            “Only 57?” Pepper said with a ghost of a smile. As the video played, she pulled her knees up to her chest and wrapped her arms around them.  “Did any of them include me?”

            “Of course, Ms. Potts. One of the first protocols he enacted was ‘4.2: Pepper Potts to the Rescue.’”

            “Oh, Tony.” Pepper put her head on her knees.  That was when she understood – in a world where there were people like Steve and Bruce and Wanda, people with powers that the average person would never understand or have, Tony wanted to help the people like Rhodey and Sam and Clint and Natasha.   People whose only powers were a sense of right and wrong and the will to stand up for what they believe in.

            Tears stung her eyes again. “Come back, Tony,” she prayed.  “I need you.  We all need you.”

 

            Two hours later, Pepper was picking at a godawful TV dinner she'd found in the freezer when Friday interrupted.  “Ms. Potts, I think you should see this,” she said, and the TV came on amid scenes of chaos.

            Pepper’s fork dropped from nerveless fingers as she tries to wrap her mind around the devastation on the news. “Happy?” she whispered hoarsely.  Her lips felt numb.

            “Mr. Hogan is not answering his phone,” Friday said after a moment.

            “Rhodey?”

            “Colonel Rhodes is not answering, but his suit is reporting positive vital signs.”

            “Bruce?”

            “Mr. Banner appears fine as well.”

            “Peter?”

            “Mr. Parker’s suit is out of signal range, it disappeared at the same time the Boss’s did.”  God, that's right, the news had said earlier that Spider-man had been in the thick of things as well.  Selfishly, guiltily, she was a little glad; Peter’s aunt must be terrified, but at least Tony wasn’t alone, wherever he was.

            Unless whatever was happening here was happening everywhere.

            Pepper thought about that, about Tony watching Peter disintegrate in front of his eyes, just like all of those people on television, about him being lost and alone and probably still worrying more about the people he left behind than himself.

            She pushed her food away and set her palms flat on the table.  With a deep breath, she stood and said, “Friday, I think it’s time you showed me Protocol 4.2.”

 

***

 

             “ _Hey, sweetheart.  It would be nice to think that you’re using this suit I made you because you, I dunno, wanted to wear it to the wedding or something, but if that were the case then I would have taken this video out and put something else in, so.”_ Tony sighed and rubbed a hand over his mouth, glancing away from the camera for a moment.  When he looked back, his whiskey brown eyes had a familiar look of determination and resolve. _“If you’re watching this, then something has gone sideways and for whatever reason I’m not around to help.  Hell, maybe it's my fault. So first of all, I love you and I’m sorry that I’m not there for you right now.  Second, I know you’ve been in an Iron Man suit before – remember that one time at the LA house when you saved my life?  That was so hot – but this one is a little different.  Well, a lot different.  It’s lighter, a lot more intuitive, and a lot less pinch-y in the sensitive areas.  Friday can walk you through the basics, but the biggest thing is that you’ve got to concentrate…”_  


End file.
